The challenge

Club Med is a French travel and tourism operator who came to Rise at Seven for help with improving their German website’s backlink profile. They wanted to increase their presence in Germany, and needed a campaign to get the press talking about them whilst generating links to boost organic rankings. Being covered by the German press is a challenge on its own, but hey, we like a challenge!

The idea

Our planet is suffering. Living sustainably is therefore becoming more and more important and many of us have been trying to keep our ecological footprint as small as possible. Sustainability and green travel have long been huge topics in Germany and we also noticed that Germans were continuing to search for staycations after the pandemic. So we decided to combine the two into a data-led campaign, showcasing Germany’s most Eco-Friendly cities. Our team of data-analysts created a ranking on which cities in Germany are the most sustainable based on different criteria including green spaces, air quality, the number of vegetarian and vegan restaurants and the number of cycling routes on a city level. On a federal state level, we also considered the water consumption, the number of waste disposal facilities and the amount of household waste generated per inhabitant. Our creative team produced the assets visualising the data and our PR team promoted the story to the German press.

The results

The campaign was picked up by the German press, generating 55 links through to Club Med’s website and increasing their referring domains by 10%. Bild, HNA, T-Online, Der Westen, SVZ and WA were just some that linked to our campaign. The campaign page appeared 14,4K times in search results and Club Med’s organic search results for ‘die grünsten Städte Deutschlands’ went up by 90%. As sustainability is a key priority for Club Med, we managed to place them right where their audience is.